Just remember - with your intellectual property, if it's anything like Middle Earth, Elric or Lankhmar ... *looks at DamonJynx* it's being done to death already. Just look around at all the other stuff coming out for Pathfinder, Mythras and all the others.

You are right, of course, but the setting is "High Fantasy" with, I hope, enough of a difference to distinguish it from those works you mentioned.

My own experience has been that there has been a shortage of Legend material with a familiar feel for new GMs. I found it took a fair amount of playing and forum reading to become completely comfortable with some of the concepts. I am speaking from the point of view of a non-D100 gamer that converted across. Initially, I struggled with Cults and Guilds and just how central they are to PC development. Magic also took a fair bit of getting used to, mind you, but I may just be slow.

I'd love to try get at the D&D space and convert more of them to D100 systems - especially Legend.

alex_greene wrote:Just remember - with your intellectual property, if it's anything like Middle Earth, Elric or Lankhmar ... *looks at DamonJynx* it's being done to death already. Just look around at all the other stuff coming out for Pathfinder, Mythras and all the others.

Keep in mind that some people want a game system to simulate the feel of their favourite novel. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Personally I think Legend works best simulating gritty low fantasy located in that nebulous zone between classic Swords & Sorcery (Robert E Howard, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, David Gemmell, et al) and modern Grimdark (Joe Abercrombie, Scott Lynch, Mark Lawrence, Daniel Polanski, Glen Cook, etc). It also works surprisingly well for Gothic Horror and Dark Fantasy in the style of Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, Brian McNaughton, or Tanith Lee. It's not so great at simulating the kind of high fantasy produced by many of Tolkien's numerous imitators - although Tolkien himself is far more restrained than his successors.

Moorcock makes some good points, but there are a few places where he goues off the deep end. He does correctly diagnose the key weakness of Tolkien's work (i.e. that he engages in a degree of sentimentalism alien to the source material he draws upon and never quite follows the implications of his themes to their logical conclusion), but sometimes his conclusions are way off the mark - it's a bold critic indeed who claims that Tolkien wasn't familiar with the early medieval literature that he draws upon and that he doesn't communicate the horrors of war. Keep in mind that at the heart of Moorcock's criticisms are concerns that Tolkien's work embodies a corrupt middle class morality. And yet Tolkien clearly doesn't approve of comfortable middle class complacency - in the long run the isolationist Hobbits simply cannot cut themselves off from the changes taking place in the wider world and come very close to being enslaved by Saruman. Equating Tolkien's depiction of the Shire with the cloying rural nostalgia of R. F. Delderfield is simply dishonest.

Incidentally, it is possible to write good fantasy from a progressive viewpoint - look at Ursula Le Guin, Elizabeth A Lynn, C.J. Cherryh, China Mieville, J.K. Rowling, or even Andre Norton. Moorcock has written several times that one of his concerns was the uncritical acceptance of conservative authors such as Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Robert Heinlen by otherwise progressive people.

As for the Tough Guide to Fantasyland, Diana Wynne Jones is really taking aim at the kind of commodified fantasy that didn't really emerge until the 1980s.

Moorcock makes some good points, but there are a few places where he goues off the deep end. He does correctly diagnose the key weakness of Tolkien's work (i.e. that he engages in a degree of sentimentalism alien to the source material he draws upon and never quite follows the implications of his themes to their logical conclusion), but sometimes his conclusions are way off the mark - it's a bold critic indeed who claims that Tolkien wasn't familiar with the early medieval literature that he draws upon and that he doesn't communicate the horrors of war. Keep in mind that at the heart of Moorcock's criticisms are concerns that Tolkien's work embodies a corrupt middle class morality. And yet Tolkien clearly doesn't approve of comfortable middle class complacency - in the long run the isolationist Hobbits simply cannot cut themselves off from the changes taking place in the wider world and come very close to being enslaved by Saruman. Equating Tolkien's depiction of the Shire with the cloying rural nostalgia of R. F. Delderfield is simply dishonest.

Incidentally, it is possible to write good fantasy from a progressive viewpoint - look at Ursula Le Guin, Elizabeth A Lynn, C.J. Cherryh, China Mieville, J.K. Rowling, or even Andre Norton. Moorcock has written several times that one of his concerns was the uncritical acceptance of conservative authors such as Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Robert Heinlen by otherwise progressive people.

As for the Tough Guide to Fantasyland, Diana Wynne Jones is really taking aim at the kind of commodified fantasy that didn't really emerge until the 1980s.

I must point out that while the aim should be to present something innovative, settings and structures which appeal and which invite immersion; this should be balanced by giving the Adventurers things to actually do ...

Gods, I sometimes wonder if I should have put out the Arcania of Legend book I wrote as an Abbott & Greene book, or the Cities of Legend book, because you'd have them in your hands and you'd be rapt in wonder as you read of the Cult of Atro, the blood feud between the two major trades Guilds, and mysteries such as the Lake Monster and the Creeping Cold.

And not a single Dark Lord to be seen.

Oh, and there are hotels and hostels, not taverns and inns. And they serve a variety of foodstuffs, not just Stew and Bread.

Tolkien was well aware of the horrors of war, having served in the trenches during the Great one.

The tone of his books comes from his academic and Catholic backgrounds, and a rather selective narration; horror exists, but the reader doesn't get directly confronted with it. I suspect if Tolkien is sentimental, it's in hindsight, because he knows that everything is about to change.

I remember there's a youtube commenter who states that most games get Cthulhu wrong, and I try to empathize in my games when I had the chance to dungeon master that you're not supposed to be able to kill dragons.

Well, apparently, I'm nowhere near as well read as I thought! Particularly in the non-fiction category.

For me, seeing as we're discussing "settings" an RPG setting should accomplish most, if not all, of the following and then some:

1. Be interesting and fantastic not necessarily outlandish
2. Have a history that enables GM's to extrapolate logical adventures in the past, present and future of the setting
3. Provide plenty of opportunities for conflict - after all resolving conflict is where the "fun" is at; Religious, Guild, Political - local, national and international - are all good jumping off points
4. Be focused on a specific genre but allow space for cross-genre adventures; as an example, Hawkmoon works as a setting because while it's primarily swords & sorcery, it combines some post-apocalyptic elements and science fiction; if you add some Lovecraftian/Gothic type horror into the mix... you see what I mean
5. Contain an over-reaching story element/theme that can provide material for adventuring; a dimensional portal opens up/an alien invasion occurs, the Avengers aren't there to save the day - things turn to ****, fast forward a couple of 100 years and we've now regressed to a feudal/renaissance period with alien overlords... as an example
6. Be tailored for the system; over the top crazy action - best suited for "heroic" systems such as D20 where there is plenty of healing and hit points available, gritty, realistic (well, as much as possible in a fantastic setting) action best suited to "non-heroic" systems such as Legend
7. Have a geography that is ripe for exploration; there be Dragons!
6. Be FUN!

I love Gemmell, Cook, Erickson and so many more and would be lying if I said they haven't influenced my games and setting. I absolutely love the Xoth books and would love to see more conversions from Mongoose in the future.

My RPG group, for the most part, had no real RPG experience but they wanted to play in a "High Fantasy" setting. I found that Legend rose to the challenge spectacularly!

High Fantasy isn't my favourite genre, depending on how it is done, but competing against PC and MMO games like World of Warcraft, it definitely aided the Players' entry in to the Tabletop RPG environment.